A business organization may house some or all of its computing assets, such as data storage devices, servers, network devices and other information technology (IT) equipment, at a physical facility, referred to as a data center, in order to manage these computing assets efficiently. The hardware devices in a data center can be housed in metallic cabinets, referred to as racks.
With the recent proliferation of smaller and more powerful computing devices, a greater amount of energy is required to power these devices while more heat is generated by them. Thus, environmental metrics, including temperatures and power requirements, can vary significantly across a large data center facility or between different data centers. Another factor that is of concern to data center operators is asset management. It is difficult to keep track of many individual pieces of equipment, as equipment can be added and removed frequently or simply moved from one location to another within the same center or between centers.